Plain Language at Work Newsletters 28 February 2011 — Number 45

Welcome!

The Middle East

The next step: new constitutions

Cairo protesters packing up: now comes the hard part.

While the conflicts in the Middle East now dominate the news, the next stage will be equally important: the writing of new constitutions. Some, like Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain, and Tunisia, already have democratic constitutions that require little change. Libya, however, largely tribal and on the brink of civil war, does not have a constitution. That country will have to start from scratch.

In any case, the writing of a constitution is a critical step. If it fails, as it often has, it can lead to
further conflict and war. It not only sets up the rules by which people want to govern themselves and defines their principle beliefs. It is also a process for resolving conficts between parties, interest groups, and other stakeholders.

Princeton University has a remarkable Website, Constitution Writing and Conflict Resolution. It features 190 new constitutions created since 1975 with many stories about the ways in which constitutions can succeed or fail.

If successful, a new constitution can be an occasion of great hope and renewal for a nation, the point at which the people and the government are one. The problem is keeping them like that, or as Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote, "shaping the nation to fit the government."

Good advice from Gene Sharp

Gene Sharp: American toppler of autocrats.

During the mostly non-violent uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, the media were fond of pointing out the influence of an American writer, Gene Sharp. An editorial in the Los Angeles Times paid tribute to Sharp's 94-page book, From Dictatorship to Democracy, available on his Website.

Based on the teachings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, Jr, the book has been translated into 24 languages. It not only serves as a guide for toppling autocrats world-wide but also has some practical advice for setting up new governments. The Times gave several quotes, including the following:

"Preparing a new constitution will take considerable time and thought. Popular participation in this process is desirable and required for ratification of a new text or amendments.

"One should be very cautious about including in the constitution promises that later might prove impossible to implement or provisions that would require a highly centralized government, for both can facilitate a new dictatorship.

"The wording of the constitution should be easily understood by the majority of the population. A constitution should not be so complex or ambiguous that only lawyers or other elites can claim to understand it...

"The fall of one regime does not bring in a utopia. Rather it opens the way for hard work and long efforts to build more just social, economic and political relationships."

George Kingsley Zipf

The principle of least effort

Harvard linguist George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950)

The over-ruling requirement of plain language comes from the fact that people (and
the whole animal kingdom) are inherently lazy. They want to find the easiest, most
efficient way of doing things. It is all about conserving precious energy.

In 1949, George Kingsley Zipf of Harvard University
published Human Behavior and the Principle of Least Effort: An
Introduction to Human Ecology.

It has proved to be a very useful work. Zipf's Law explains not only language, but also properties
of the Internet, distribution of income within nations, and many other
collections of data. For example, the rank vs distribution of individual incomes in a country
approximates this law. Breaks in this normal distribution create pressure for
change, even revolution.

A typical Zipf-law rank distribution. The y-axis represents occurrence frequency, and the x-axis represents rank (highest at the left).

Word frequency and reading ease

Zipf's Law reveals fascinating things about language. For one thing, there is an
exponential relationship between hard and easy words in a text. A word's
frequency is inversely proportional to its rank in the frequency table. Thus the
most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most
frequent word, three times as often as the third most frequent word, etc.

Easy writing makes for difficult reading

Zipf's work showed that the reader's interest is often in conflict the writer's. The
reader wants the easiest way of reading, while the writer wants the easiest way
of writing. Making reading easy always makes for hard writing. Good writing is always difficult to learn.

Good writers put themselves in the shoes of their readers. They learn to adapt their
writing to the interests, expectations, and needs of their audience. This means close
attention to the readers' reading skills and habits as well as their interests
and concerns.

Using word-frequency lists

We have known for a long time that a word's frequency of use is a good indication of
its readability. While only a
few words are used very often, many or most are used rarely. Twenty-five percent
of English words consist in ten words: the, I, and, to, was, my, in, of, a, and
it. The first 100 most frequent words make up almost half of all written
material. The first 300 words make up about 65 percent of it.

Writers of textbooks and all other forms of instruction should draw on the vocabulary that readers use most frequently.
Along with readability formulas, word-ranking and frequency lists are useful tools for reaching your audience.

For nearly every language, you can find lists of words ranked by frequency. These lists are usually based on the countings of all the words in a large body of literature called a "corpus." These ranking lists are a great help in writing plain language.

It analyzes the text you paste in to give you a frequency ranking of words in your text and the percentage of unique words (words only used once). The higher the percentage, the greater the vocabulary richness and the burden you put on readers.